They get new fancy jobs at four times their old salaries! Yes, this is one of the best kept secrets in New Delhi corridors of power!
Once you get a government job, you become a new person or become a slave for your life? It all depends on how you look at life. As for the average Indians, more so the New Delhi-based Indians of certain castes and family traditions, serving the governments, alien or your own, as now, are the only way to salvation.
As a nation, India had always been an invaded country. And as a people we, Indians, honestly, had never been known for our fighting spirit. Yes, we might have one or two isolated heroes. That is all. Much more so when the British came and gave us our English language education. As the Prime Minister had the gumption to confess before the Oxford Congregation that we are very good when it comes to confessions. He almost literally confessed to our occupies”: you came and gave us dignity. Our lessons in good governance.
So, it is no wonder we the educated elites, the IAS officials that we are a nation of shameless people. We grab and keep everything, be it government bungalows or foreign pensions(the PM and the Planning Commission Dy., among others enjoy very hefty World Bank pensions and also now enjoy power without any sense of remorse and also go about standing before the hapless people and lecture them about what they should do and should not do.
Now, in New Delhi it is no secret. What is known to everyone is that once a senior bureaucrat retires officially, then he or she gets another good job. Thus we find that Wajahat Habibullh retired on Sept 30 as Secretary Panchayat Raj. He didn’t go home! He instead drove to another office, from Krishi Bhavan to the nearby CGO complex and took up a job as chief information commissioner, as job on par with Chief Election Commissioner! His basic salary? Rs.30, 000! In total Rs.60, 000! Not this alone. A car, a bungalow, home office, two clerks, a peon and protocol no money can buy! There are now hundreds of bureaucrats doing the same thing. A retired secretary now drawing four times the salary! It should be a scandal in any other society. Not in India, the most hypocritical and the most cynical society anywhere in the world!
Mr.Habibullah in a recent interview says he will make the right of citizens for government information transparent. He wants us to believe that the existing draconian Official Secrets Act. There are any numbers of new jobs for which the retiring secretaries can aspire for.
No, it is only to get squatter population among the retiring secretaries in Delhi! A.N.Tiwari is the man who as secretary of the Dept of Personnel piloted the bill through Parliament. Tiwari is supposed to retire this December. But found himself in a new job as the information commissioner in Delhi! It is new five-year tenure. So, much good for him and so much worse for other officers! D.N.Padhi quit as secretary, power but took up a five-year job in Orissa! Others in this league of infamy are: R.K.Mishra who retired as chief secretary, Karnataka and took up job as chief information commissioner. Shailaja Chandra, the chief secretary of Delhi and becomes chief of Grievances Cell! Vineeta Rai, former secretary now secretary Administrative reforms Commission! Says a report: “No chief secretary of MP in the past decade has ever retired!” Same story in Jharkand!
So much you be damned talking about panchayat raj! 140 MPs the Congress party has in Parliament. And you have an unelected Prime Minister. So, what do you do?
Simply while away your time? Yes, that is what is happening, with all our timid media covering up so much of our non-performance in this government. Our media had failed us badly. In the USA too we find the media is now blamed for making Bush go ahead with so many myths about his second term’s miserable failure. Says Paul Krugman, the economist in a column has the courage to say in the face of Bush: “Pundits may try to resurrect Mr. Bush’s reputation, but his cult of personality is dead-and the inscription on the tombstone reads, “Bronie, you’re doing a heck of a job”. So, he concludes: So the long nightmare won’t really be over until journalists ask themselves what did we know, when did we know it, and why didn’t we tell the public?”
When our country will have such a media and such a transparent debate about our masters’ failures. I mean our political leaders and our cushy anti-people bureaucrats?